Large Hadron Collider starts up, produces first collisions

After a series of complications and setbacks, the Large Hadron Collider sees …

Boy, you go away for a weekend, and all sorts of stuff starts happening at the biggest science fair the world has ever seen. The CERN collaboration's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sent beams of protons flying around its 27 km length in each direction over the weekend, and Monday saw them run two beams simultaneously and slam them into one another, producing the collider's first ever particle collisions. It would appear that any time-traveling quantum bird sent by the Higgs boson was unable to disrupt yesterday's run.

Last fall, the LHC team came close to reaching this same milestone, but fell short when a massive quench failure damaged a number of the superconducting magnets that are used to help guide, accelerate, and squeeze the beams of particles as they move around the tunnel. This failure occurred only nine days after the first particles were circulated, but was only one in a seriesof setbacks that the collider would experience. Broken support structures, helium leaks, and frayed wiring all required that the equipment be warmed up from the frosty operating conditions of 1.8 Kelvin. The most recent mishap involved a bird dropping bread into an electrical transformer. All of this has caused some to speculate that the Higgs boson—the elusive particle that is the basis of mass—is actually causing these failures to occur from the future. Presumably from its fortress of doom and solitude.

In contrast to last year's start-up, this event has occurred with very little press coverage. Some of the US' mainstream news organizations don't even have a headline anywhere on their front page. (Adam Lambert's kiss and Khloe Karadashian's nesting instinct were recent top news items on CNN's main Web portal, which no longer even has a science section.) As a life-long science enthusiast, it saddens me to see so little coverage of a huge milestone in experimental physics. However, this also seems to have cut down on the inevitable "end of the world" speculation that was rampant last year.

As far as science goes, it really took a back seat to engineering, as the first collisions occurred between beams at a low injection energy, 450 GeV. At these energies, proton-proton collisions are statistical rarities, but each of the four main detectors—ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE—observed the signature spray of particles. Scientists and engineers expect to have the beams running at energies of around 1.2 TeV by Christmas, and expect to reach world-record energies of 3.5 TeV per beam sometime early next year.

Of course, all this is not for show. Scientists hope to be able to probe conditions similar to those that existed shortly after the big bang, the birth of our Universe. By slamming ultra-high energy particles into one another, they hope to replicate the quark-gluon soup that existed at that time. One of the major goals is a confirmed sighting of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model physics. It is expected to help us understand why some elementary particles, such as the W and Z bosons, have mass, and why some do not, like the photon or the gluon.

If found, the Higgs boson will fill in the last square on the bingo card of the particle zoo, allowing us to put the standard model on a shelf and not play with it again. But it could be even more exciting if we don't find the Higgs boson. We will be left with a theory that accounts (beautifully, I might add) for every elementary particle we know about except one. We'd have to develop a new theory, one that is capable of explaining everything the current standard model does, with the added capability of explaining mass. And that could prove to be very interesting.

If, and more likely when, the Higgs boson is found, the LHC will still be able to probe things that aren't covered by the standard model. 14 TeV collisions will be unlike anything ever produced in a controlled environment on Earth, although nature does this on a daily basis. Hopefully, barring further challenges from a particle from the future that travels backwards in time (the "All Good Things..." episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation anyone?) the LHC Physics program will be able to start in earnest early next year.

Listing image by CERN

Matt Ford
Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems. Emailzeotherm@gmail.com//Twitter@zeotherm

"It is expected to help us understand why some elementary particles, such as the W and Z bosons, have mass, and why some do not, like the photon or the neutrino."

Um, a nit. Doesn't the neutrino have a non-zero (although presumably very small) mass?

The Standard Model of particle physics assumed that neutrinos are massless, although adding massive neutrinos to the basic framework is not difficult. Indeed, the experimentally established phenomenon of neutrino oscillation requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses.

The strongest upper limit on the masses of neutrinos comes from cosmology: the Big Bang model predicts that there is a fixed ratio between the number of neutrinos and the number of photons in the cosmic microwave background. If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electronvolts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse. This limit can be circumvented by assuming that the neutrino is unstable; however, there are limits within the Standard Model that make this difficult. A much more stringent constraint comes from a careful analysis of cosmological data, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy surveys, and the Lyman-alpha forest. These indicate that the sum of the neutrino masses must be less than 0.3 electronvolt.

In 1998, research results at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector determined that neutrinos do indeed flavor oscillate, and therefore have mass. While this shows that neutrinos have mass, the absolute neutrino mass scale is still not known. This is due to the fact that neutrino oscillations are sensitive only to the difference in the squares of the masses. The best estimate of the difference in the squares of the masses of mass eigenstates 1 and 2 was published by KamLAND in 2005: Δm221 = 0.000079 eV2. In 2006, the MINOS experiment measured oscillations from an intense muon neutrino beam, determining the difference in the squares of the masses between neutrino mass eigenstates 2 and 3. The initial results indicate |Δm232| = 0.0027 eV2, consistent with previous results from Super-Kamiokande. Since |Δm232| is the difference of two squared masses, at least one of them has to have a value which is at least the square root of this value. Thus, there exists at least one neutrino mass eigenstate with a mass of at least 0.04 eV.

In 2009 lensing data of a galaxy cluster were analyzed to predict a neutrino mass of about 1.5 eV.

Currently a number of efforts are under way to directly determine the absolute neutrino mass scale in laboratory experiments. The methods applied involve nuclear beta decay (KATRIN and MARE) or neutrinoless double beta decay

I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Originally posted by Grashnak:I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Originally posted by Grashnak:I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Originally posted by Grashnak:I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Wake up sheeple.

Shouldn't you wait until the redditors show up before trolling them? I'll give you credit though, this was pretty slick.

This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

Originally posted by Grashnak:I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Originally posted by Demondeluxe:This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

Originally posted by Grashnak:I'm tired of the gullible fools who believe the "Anthropogenic Particle Collision" (APC) propagandists. These scientists are just trying to scare us with their "we built a huge particle accelerator" mumbo jumbo. Can't you see it's all about money?

Particles have been colliding for 6000 years (since god created the universe) and sometimes they collide a lot and sometimes they don't. I see no reason to believe that humans have any influence on particle collisions.

Wake up sheeple.

OK, I'll bite... Prediction: it won't be any time at all before Al Gore and his cohorts in scientific masochism decide to declare the LHC a major factor in accelerating Global Warming--uh, but you won't hear about this until after the maximum power cycle is reached, of course, when Gore and pals "discover" that particle collisions are actually creating CO2 in quantities that are "off the scale." The UN will then ask Gore to address its members, and afterward he'll be nominated for another Nobel prize upon publication of his scathing, scientifically approximating compendium: "Man Bad, Technology Bad, Nature Good!"

Originally posted by WaltC:OK, I'll bite... Prediction: it won't be any time at all before Al Gore and his cohorts in scientific masochism decide to declare the LHC a major factor in accelerating Global Warming--uh, but you won't hear about this until after the maximum power cycle is reached, of course, when Gore and pals "discover" that particle collisions are actually creating CO2 in quantities that are "off the scale." The UN will then ask Gore to address its members, and afterward he'll be nominated for another Nobel prize upon publication of his scathing, scientifically approximating compendium: "Man Bad, Technology Bad, Nature Good!"

Wake up, sheeple!

You don't need to go that far - just the power consumption of the thing (which I doubt is all "green" electricity) would probably be enough to get it onto the IPCC's blacklist of GHG emitters Seriously though, research facilities have been largely exempt from efforts to cut down on GHG emissions, for instance in the European Emissions Trading Scheme. They do have to pay for it in their power bills, though.

Originally posted by Demondeluxe:This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

You don't need to go that far - just the power consumption of the thing (which I doubt is all "green" electricity)...

Can you imagine the size of the wind turbine farms it would take to power this bad boy?

I wonder... Could we build a giant turbine on the moon to catch *solar* wind, and then microwave the generated energy back to earth? It would solve a lot of issues with finding good spots for wind farms here on old earth *and* look neat in the night sky!

If anyone can come up with a plan for this, remember to include me in the patent application

Originally posted by Demondeluxe:This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

Originally posted by YourConscience:This discussion thread has produced many unexpected laughs. Thank you, everyone.

/Sent from the future on my neural transmitter.

For some reason, the LHC seems to call out to the comedian inside Ars readers. To this day I still read "Large Hardon Collider" (don't remember who came up with that one) whenever I see LHC written in full. And I giggle.

Originally posted by YourConscience:This discussion thread has produced many unexpected laughs. Thank you, everyone.

/Sent from the future on my neural transmitter.

For some reason, the LHC seems to call out to the comedian inside Ars readers. To this day I still read "Large Hardon Collider" (don't remember who came up with that one) whenever I see LHC written in full. And I giggle.

Originally posted by Demondeluxe:This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

What would we title this Inquisition?

The Swedish Inquisition!!!

You put der heretic in der pot, bork bork..

Does this mean no toture via the Comfy Chair? Or, that the Comfy Chair will now be ergonomic and efficient, a la Ikea?

Originally posted by Demondeluxe:This is clearly just a plot by the godless soulless liberal scum to manipulate the masses into believing that the universe worked based on godless science, rather than operating on gods will alone. Next thing you know they will try to tell us that god didn't create the world in 7 days, and that evolution is how we came to be. I think we are about due for another inquisition, maybe we can cleanse the world of these heretics.

What would we title this Inquisition?

The Swedish Inquisition!!!

You put der heretic in der pot, bork bork..

Does this mean no toture via the Comfy Chair? Or, that the Comfy Chair will now be ergonomic and efficient, a la Ikea?

Actually, it means that you will be locked in a dungeon with thousands of boxes filled with various Ikea items. You must assemble them all before you are free to go. The downside, all of them are missing parts.

Originally posted by WaltC:The UN will then ask Gore to address its members, and afterward he'll be nominated for another Nobel prize upon publication of his scathing, scientifically approximating compendium: "Man Bad, Technology Bad, Nature Good!"

That's too easy to predict. We all know that you don't have to do much for a Nobel peace prize these days...

1. The failure was from damage to a liquid helium transfer line, leading to a loss of coolant that overwhelmed the emergency relief valves in the dipole string. The quench was a secondary effect, and is expected (though rare) during normal operation.

2. "The" Higgs is good enough nomenclature for CNN, but this is Ars. Peter Higgs described the first iteration of a symmetry-breaking mechanism that has since been extended in a number of directions. A Standard Model Higgs would be deeply boring to discover -- but a supersymmetric Higgs doublet or any number of other variations would fill an important role in the Standard Model and connect to physics beyond.